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Humanities and Social Sciences |
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History ProgramWomen Working on the Land History ProjectDr Ruth Ford is currently conducting a research project on women's agricultural labour in Australia. 'The man on the land', whether the shearer, the drover or the seasonal farm worker, has figured largely in Australian popular iconography and history, while women have been largely absent from Australian agricultural and rural history. Yet, throughout the early twentieth century, women did substantial amounts of agricultural labour. They milked cows, tended poultry, stooked hay, marked lambs, pruned fruit trees and picked fruit. Dr Ruth Ford's research project 'Working the Land: Women's Rural Labour and the Making of a Nation, Australia, 1901-1945' aims to analyse the personal experiences and identities of rural women in south-eastern Australia. It seeks new ways of conceptualising the relationship between work on the land, country and city, and gender, race and Australian identity during times of sweeping change. A major outcome of the project will be the publication of a book. Oral history interviews with women from this era, as well as archival research on diaries, letters, scrapbooks, photographs and newspapers, will form the basis of the study. The project will focus on women who laboured on farms and fruit blocks/orchards as daughters, wives and mothers as well as women who farmed by themselves or did paid rural labour including fruit-picking and milking.
Interested in participating? (PDF 362Kb)If you are over 75 years old and would like to be interviewed about your memories and experiences of living and working on farms or fruit blocks/orchards or if you have photographs, diaries, letters or scrapbooks of women working on the land which you are willing for me to look at and/or copy in south-eastern Australia from 1901-1945, please contact: Content Approved by: Head of School |